Crims beware: More cameras are watching you

By Elisia Seeber

In a quiet city car park a tall man with shaggy brown hair gets out of his car.

He is talking on the phone as he pulls a clear bag out of his front jeans pocket.

He tips out a bunch of ecstasy pills onto the bonnet of his car.

He looks around, checking to see if anyone is watching and continues to go about his business.

What he doesn’t know is that he is being watched and police are moments away from arresting him.

He has been caught on camera.

“We use CCTV systems to help the cops on the street patrol on a Friday and Saturday night, by telling them who to look out for and where to get to, but we can also capture the footage, save it and use it as evidence in court,” said Perth City Senior Constable Detective Shandell Castledine

Open-street closed circuit television systems better known as CCTV cameras are the eyes on the streets of Perth.

If you ever feel like you are being watched as you walk to work, eat your lunch, chat with friends or line up to get into a club on a Friday night, it’s because you are.

There are currently over 175 cameras watching the city of Perth 24 hours a day and the numbers are about to increase.

Perth established Australia's first open-street closed circuit television system in July 1991 and since then there has been a rapid expansion of CCTV installation.

On December 18, 2008 the City of Perth approved a plan to increase the CCTV network adding 14 new cameras to the CBD and Northbridge in early 2009.

The City believes the CCTV network serves as both a deterrent and an important monitoring tool.

“After extensive community consultation the City of Perth identified 12 projects to act on immediately; increasing the CCTV surveillance coverage was one of those items and we are pleased to announce this positive development,” said Lord Mayor Lisa Scaffidi in 2008.

This year Perth Council announced it would spend $2.7 million over the next few years to expand and replace Perth’s camera network.

“From my perspective and in my role I think the more cameras that we have the better,” said Senior Constable Detective Castledine.

“We’re cops, so we want them everywhere,” added her husband Police Officer Steve Castledine.

“The purpose is to make Perth a safe city,” City of Perth CCTV monitor, Bill Strong told the ABC recently.

The most common reasons for installing CCTV cameras in town centres has been to combat anti-social behaviour, graffiti, violence around licensed venues and street-level drug dealing.

“I’ve been in Northbridge when big brawls have broken out and I don’t think anyone involved even thinks about the cameras, there’s too much adrenaline pumping for the thought to even cross their mind,” said Northbridge clubber, Carmelo Genovese.

“Or they’re just too drunk to care,” he added.

CCTV is said to be an effective method to facilitate immediate responses to incidents, combating certain types of crime.

“It reassures people and enables them to know a response can be quickly achieved, if something happens, we can dispatch an ambulance,” Mr. Strong told the ABC.

Increasing the number of CCTV cameras on the streets has aroused debate on whether people do feel safer knowing the cameras are there or if they feel like they are an invasion of privacy.

“There are people in our society that say CCTV is an abuse of privacy, but we believe if you’re not doing anything wrong then you have nothing to worry about,” said Senior Constable Detective Castledine.

Former Victorian police commissioner Christine Nixon believes that there has been a generational shift on the views of privacy among young people.

“Young people do not care about their privacy and there is little reason to protect it,” said Mrs. Nixon at the IQ2 debate on ‘Better more cameras than more crime’ held in Sydney July 6 2010.

Mrs. Nixon used the social networking websites Twitter and Face book as examples of how young people share private information with others everyday.

''These arguments about protecting people's privacy: in many cases people don't care about their privacy being protected,'' she argued.

“I can’t say having the cameras around in Northbridge or Fremantle has ever bothered me, but then again I haven’t done anything bad enough to worry,” said Mr. Genovese.

However, studies conducted during the late 90s show that people are concerned that CCTV surveillance was used to undermine individual freedoms and facilitate oppressive forms of social control.

Concerns which human rights Barrister Julian Burnside agrees with.

“There is a gaping difference between people consciously reducing their privacy through social media and people having it stolen by stealth through CCTV,” Barrister Burnside said at the July IQ2 debate.

“The perception of safety argued for, could not be worth the privacy lost to it,” he said.

However, City of Perth, Lord Mayor Lisa Scaffidi believes that the community does feel safer knowing the cameras are there.

“Community results and comments back to us indicate that people do feel safer knowing that there are cameras around the city that can be a good recourse or extra policing tool should things go wrong,” she told the ABC.

Results of research on the impacts of CCTV in open-street settings have to date been unclear.

Welsh and Farrington's 2002 meta-analysis study compared 13 evaluations on CCTV in city centres and in public housing, seven located in England, five in the United States and one in Scotland.

Five studies found that there was a decrease in criminal offences and three found an increase in criminal offences.

The remaining five evaluations showed that there was no effect.

Chief investigator of the largest evidence-based CCTV research program in Australia, Paul Wilson, spoke for the opposition at the IQ2 debate.

He explained that the cameras aided in detection for a handful of crimes in his research: a man urinating on a beach, a man running naked and someone gesturing with two fingers behind a police officer.

Aside from that evidence, police still use CCTV footage on a day to day basis says Senior Constable Detective Castledine

“CCTV is valuable to us as an investigative tool but it depends on how clear the footage is and what it captures.

“In my current role I go to work everyday and without a doubt we probably have five or six jobs where someone’s been seriously assaulted and the first thing we ask is was this captured on CCTV.

“If it was we are able to sit down and analyse the footage which may identify our person of interest straight up.

“If we can’t identify that person then we look at other options.

“We are able to send out a state wide broad cast saying this person is wanted for questioning in relation to…can you identify them?

“We use Crimestoppers, place blasts on Channel 7 and make public media releases and from them we may get 30 or 40 information hits from the public.

“Putting the footage out publically usually results in someone having seen the person or even spoken with that person before the incident, someone might know where they live and can identify them,” said Senior Constable Detective Castledine.

England is estimated to have more than four million security cameras, but in 2008 a senior Scotland Yard detective revealed only three per cent of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV.

“It’s good to take England’s statistics into consideration but the question you have to ask is why isn’t it helping them solve more crimes? Are their systems different? Do the operators work differently to us? Do they use the footage in their investigations?” said Senior Constable Detective Castledine.

Monitoring is arguably the most crucial element of a public CCTV system.

There are two broad modes of monitoring: active and passive.

Active monitoring refers to operators using the camera system to conduct dedicated patrols; operators remain alert to potential incidents and respond to incidents.

“Active monitoring is very useful for big street events and Friday and Saturday nights,” said Senior Constable Detective Castledine.

Passive monitoring is where monitors are in view and are casually observed by operators who may react if an alert is received.

Operators commonly have a radio tuned into the police frequency in the control room, to enable them to focus on relevant incidents.

“There have been instances where people who are in control of CCTV monitoring have abused the system.

“By that I mean the camera control operator is being a bit devious, he might zoom in on a young girl walking down the street.

“So there are ethical issues with CCTV that should be considered,” said Senior Constable Detective Castledine.

A 2006 study by Bond University in Queensland found CCTV cameras were effective at detecting violent crime but were not useful for preventing any type of crime.

“Preventing crime can be looked at in many ways, for example, the train station rapist that is on the news, is a classic example of the police asking who this man is?

“He’s allegedly raped three girls, we’ve got no idea of his identity, but someone must know him and that’s where the public comes in and can assist our investigation.

“When we catch him, we will have potentially prevented him causing harm to another woman,” said Senior Constable Detective Castledine.

Peter Homel, a research manager at the Australian Institute of Criminology, said for the affirmative in the IQ2 debate, that cameras contributed to a small but significant reduction in crime.

Mr. Homel believes the cameras are effective when teamed with other crime-control methods.

The results of the IQ2 debate on ‘Better more cameras than more crime’ showed that about 80 per cent of the audience did not want more cameras on the streets and only 19 per cent wanted an increase in CCTV surveillance.

“In a nutshell CCTV is really valuable to us, the better the footage is visually and identifiably the more useful it will be.

“At the end of the day it’s another piece of the puzzle for us”, said Senior Constable Detective Castledine.